GRAND RAPIDS, MI – Kevin Fox could have told you the kindling fire would take off “blazing saddles” as it consumed the oxygen around it, that it would flame out as it then starved for air, and that the toxic smoke would stream out an open window to disperse the heat and reignite the burn.

Instead, he and his colleagues in the Grand Rapids Fire Department’s training division let a live fire do the talking at Tuesday's ribbon-cutting for a new facility built as part of the city’s fiscal transformation. Off the beaten path along Butterworth Drive SW near the city’s yard waste site, the department has erected a live-fire training structure.

“This is an opportunity to take a firefighter and say ‘Listen, this is what it’s going to do. Now, let me show you,’” said Fox, an acting training lieutenant.

Using income-tax revenue from the city’s Transformation Fund, the fire department purchased shipping containers and used volunteer labor to construct a two-story structure with windows, a raised porch and an attached garage similar to many Grand Rapids homes. The building will be used to improve city firefighters' skills, and also help them implement new technology as they learn how to use compressed-air foam instead of water.

The foam will be implemented as the department deploys three “quick-response vehicles” slated to arrive later this year. A training truck is expected to arrive in late August.

Tuesday, the department showed off the $65,000 structure that officials estimate would have cost as much as $500,000 had it been built without what city leaders praised as the MacGyver-like resourcefulness of firefighters who provided labor. The structure’s stairwell, for example, was taken from a pedestrian bridge that used to cross Lake Michigan Drive near Covell Avenue NW.

“That was laying over here in the weeds,” said Kevin Sehlmeyer, the department’s chief of training.

The structure consists of five shipping containers - three on the main floor and two upstairs - that can be burnt again and again. Firefighters welded the stairway and other features into the containers to make the structure look like a house, with windows and porches.

“That’s real world and that’s what we’re trying to create here,” Sehlmeyer said. “It is shipping containers, yes, but it is set up like most people’s houses. We’re going to have very realistic training, not just a fire in a box.

“There has never been a place to do live-fire training (in Grand Rapids) and we’re going to have one of the nicest systems in the country. Here we actually get to put the fire out. We get to put the wet stuff on the red stuff."

Soon, that wet stuff will be compressed-air foam. The department expects the use of foam will extinguish fires more quickly. Once foam training ramps up in September, the department plans to run every firefighter through live-fire training every three months, said Lt. Brad Brown, strategic planning officer.

“The whole initiative around transformation has been pushing this” training facility and the foam, said Second Ward City Commissioner Ruth Kelly. “(Fighting fire with foam) will save lives, there’s no question about it. It will also prevent a lot of property damage.”